Digital Leasing Platform

The hub for your digital twin portfolio

Swivel was an Austin-based startup that provided a workspace network for small and medium-sized companies.

I was brought on to explore bringing the marketplace to life and simplifying the virtual tour experience.

Year

2019-2021

Disipline

Web
Product Design
Interaction Design
Product Strategy
3D Design

Virtual Tour Onboarding

Virtual Tours provide a way for clients to be present in the developed suite without the space actually being built IRL. They are a great way for leasing agents to gain tenant attention quicker and a way to imagine the suite with multiple layouts. How might we design an experience for leasing agents to digitalize their IRL portfolio?

Problems to solve

To try and better understand the current condition of our customers office suites, we put them through a TypeForm with many questions and all manual entry. We wanted to see what information we can cut back but still get all the required information. Throughout this process, we identified three main pain points.

1

The path after registration was confusing and often led to states where the user had little idea of what to do next.

2

Suite asset requirements were never defined. This resulted in the internal team designing custom assets for each suite.

3

Communication was getting lost in email threads and the number of meetings needed to be reduced.

Kit of parts

Using a mix of qualitative data and user feedback,  we identified a handful of issues with Swivel’s current onboarding.

To try and better understand the current condition of our customers suites, we put them through a type form with many questions and all manual entry. How can we cut back what we are asking and still get all the required information? I worked with the architectural team to better understand what information was essential and what could be done at later time.

American Traditional
Coastal Contemporary
Industrial

User Interface

Once we finalized the flow, we researched existing onboarding solutions to get a sense of current design trends. Vertical scrolling is a common pattern we all do when interacting. Both, the form and chat history is scrollable for users to quickly go back and see decisions. We didn't want our form to be overwhelming to the customer - we decided to show one question per page with the added visuals.

Impact

After completing an MVP, we released our Virtual Suite onboarding to a handful of beta customers. We used feedback we heard from our CS team and sales team, who were talking directly to our customers to make some additional changes. The kit of parts have been a huge hit - more kits are being made and less custom assets are being produced.

1

Reduced time for completion by 50%

2

Onboarded +100,000 sqft in a month

3

The Kit of Parts help set a baseline for what to expect in your suite.

Marketplace of Suites

A network of suites, buildings and expert agents in the industry.

Information Architecture

How might we design an experience for leasing agents to view, see progress and manage their portfolio?

Redesign Improvements

Whenever a customer set up a building, Swivel provided them with a free "building page." This page was used as an additional resource to market their building. As Swivel transitioned into a lighter Design System, the building page also needed to be consistant. While designing the improvement, I had to keep in mind that customers were not happy about their images getting cropped weird and wanted the ability for more.Currently, the images didn't have a common aspect ratio and we only allowed for 3. The solution I came up with was to have all photos be a 4:3 aspect ratio. When doing this, it organically allowed for 5 photos to be shown. This section is also dynamic depending on how many photos get uploaded - We can show one cover, 2 halves or 5 photos.

Conclusion

The Digital Leasing Platform is an on going project. There is always room for improvements and new features. Customers use this to navigate around, get specific links, and manage suite progress.To date, the Digital Leasing Platform has shipped dozens of features, tested even more ideas using experimentation, and is continuing to work on improving our product for our next group of customers.